KbdLedTray

Most keyboards, including those on a laptop are fitted with small LED light indicators to show state of caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock buttons. Each state has a different effect on keyboard input, and it’s best to be aware of it before writing. To help out with keyboards not fitted with such indicators, KbdLedTray quietly sits in the tray area, showing relevant information.

The application comes in a pretty lightweight package, being easy to carry around on a thumb drive to use on other computers, mostly because it requires no installation. It can run right after download, with a tray icon added.

It only creates one icon in the tray area. It’s split into three sections, one for each of the three special keys. Whenever a specific key is on, the corresponding indicator turns green. When turned off, the indicator is black. One can recognize keys either through simple experimentation, or from corresponding characters above each LED indicator.

There are some useful tweaks to be made with default Windows features. For instance, placing a shortcut in the system Startup folder makes it run with Windows so it’s ready when reaching the desktop. On the other hand, it can have a hotkey command assigned from the Properties of a shortcut to launch whenever necessary.